Join Sloane Crosley, Merve Emre, Heidi Julavits, and the staff of McNally Editions as we raise a glass to three iconic New York Writers and three provocative works: Constant Reader, I Am Alien to Life, and The Stepdaughter.

Stay after the discussion to drink, mingle, and toast three years of McNally Editions.

---

Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927–28 by Dorothy Parker (1898–1967): Dorothy Parker’s complete weekly New Yorker column about books and people and the rigors of reviewing.

“All I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker. The funny lady. The only lady at the table. The woman who made her living by her wit . . . Who always got off the perfect line at the perfect moment, who never went home and lay awake wondering what she ought to have said because she had said exactly what she ought to have.” —Nora Ephron, Esquire

I Am Alien to Life by Djuna Barnes (1892–1982): The best of Djuna Barnes’s dark, droll, incisive short fiction, spanning her all-too-brief career, edited and introduced by Merve Emre.

“Djuna Barnes is a writer of wild and original gifts . . .To her name there is always to be attached the splendor of Nightwood, a lasting achievement of her great gifts and eccentricities—her passionate prose and, in this case, a genuineness of human passions.” —Elizabeth Hardwick

The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood (1931–1996): A lavish Upper West Side apartment is the site of a familial cold war about to enter a phase of dangerous escalation. A wicked stepmother finds her ideal prey in Blackwood’s “quite brilliant” debut (The Times).

“Blackwood’s macabre humor teases out the farcical aspects of human behavior at its most awkward and unmanageable, addressing outrageous situations with glacial detachment and overtones of Gothic dread. ‘The worst that could happen,’ in Blackwood’s fiction, is what is always happening, and from a certain perspective, always, horribly, hilarious.” —Gary Indiana

---

Sloane Crosley is the author of the essay collections I Was Told There’d Be Cake (a 2009 finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor), How Did You Get This Number, and Look Alive Out There (a 2019 Thurber Prize finalist); the novels The Clasp and Cult Classic; and, most recently, her memoir, Grief Is for People. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair, she lives in New York City.

 

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and a contributing writer at the New Yorker.

 

Heidi Julavits is the author of four novels and two books of nonfiction, The Folded Clock and Directions to Myself. With Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton, she edited Women in Clothes. She is a founding editor of The Believer magazine and a professor at Columbia University.

 

 

 

RSVP Below